The mysterious  windy Venus is revealed for the first time:

The mysterious  windy Venus is revealed for the first time:

Context

For the first time, the night side of the Venus has been observed and how the atmosphere circulates on the night side of Venus on a global scale

What are the characteristics of the night side of Venus?

• There is wind and cloud patterns in the night side of planet Venus and behaves very differently from the part facing the Sun.
• The night side exhibits unexpected and previously-unseen cloud types, morphologies, and dynamics — some of which appear to be connected to features on the planet’s surface
• Venus’ atmosphere is dominated by strong winds that whirl around the planet far faster than Venus itself rotates.

What is super-rotation?

• Strong winds whirl around Venus which are faster than Venus’s own rotation speed.
• This phenomenon, known as ‘super-rotation’, sees Venusian winds rotating up to 60 times faster than the planet below, pushing and dragging along clouds within the atmosphere as they go.
• These clouds travel fastest at the upper cloud level, some 65 to 72 kilometres above the surface.

Why so much significance to night side of the planet ?

• The focus has primarily on night side because it has remained poorly explored.
• The upper clouds on the planet’s night side has been seen by thermal emission, but it has been difficult to observe them because enough detail could not be picked up.

What technique has been used to study the night side of the planet?

• The Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) on European Space Agency (ESA)’s Venus Express spacecraft was used to observe the clouds in the infrared.
• Rather than capturing single images, VIRTIS gathered a ’cube’ of hundreds of images of Venus acquired simultaneously at different wavelengths.
• This allowed the team to combine numerous images to improve the visibility of the clouds, and see them at unprecedented quality.
• The VIRTIS images thus reveal phenomena on Venus’ night side that have never before been seen on the dayside.